The History of Composition:
Reclaiming Our Lost Generations
ROBIN VARNUM
As I sat in the audience of a well-attended session at the 1991 Conference on
College Composition and Communication convention in Boston, I was
distressed but not surprised to hear panelists Janet Emig and Janice Lauer,
whose contributions to composition studies are unquestionably of the highest significance, characterize themselves as members of the "first generation" of our field. Professor Emig went so far as to accuse her juniors of
ahistoricity, claiming that members of the current "third generation" fail to
distinguish between the achievements of the first and second generations
("Sisypha"). Professor Lauer accused Karen Burke LeFevre, in particular,
of having slighted important work on invention by her predecessors in the
1960s and 1970s ("Disciplinary"). From where I sat, however, it seemed that
Lauer and Emig, no less than LeFevre, were participants in the long academic tradition whereby the authors of newer works dismiss previous work
as old-fashioned or inadequate. Worse, in describing themselves and others
who came to prominence in the 1960s as members of composition's first
generation, Emig and Lauer were claiming not to have had predecessors.
Emig and Lauer are not alone in discounting the contributions of
composition teachers who labored in the 1940s and 1950s or of those who
taught in the early decades of the twentieth century. Stephen North has
chosen to date the birth of the field to 1963, as if nothing before that were
worth talking about (15). Although other historians have focussed on the
nineteenth century, and particularly on the period after the Civil War when
composition courses first appeared in American colleges and universities,
the sixty years between roughly 1900 and 1960 have been characterized as a
period of stagnation in the history of composition and as a period in which
"current-traditional" rhetoric, an approach developed in the late nineteenth
century, operated as a monolithic and increasingly obstructive paradigm.
James Berlin shrugs off the first three decades of the twentieth century as a
period during which current-traditional rhetoric went virtually unchallenged
as the dominant paradigm for the teaching of composition (Writing 85;
Rhetoric 9). Donald Stewart derides current-traditional rhetoric as belonging to "the Stone Age of our discipline" ("History" 17). Robert Connors
40 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
specifically dismisses the period between 1900 and 1930 as the "Dark Ages"
of composition ("Textbooks" 189). Richard Young and Maxine Hairston
applaud a "paradigm shift" which they say occurred in the 1960s, displacing
an old-fashioned and wrong-headed paradigm which might best be forgotten
(Young 35; Hairston 15).
Such characterizations of our history have the effect of denying the
resources and lessons of portions of the past to many of us currently teaching
composition. As Kenneth Burke has made clear, any account in language,
including accounts of history, operates as a "terministicscreen," both reflecting and deflecting reality (Language 45, 47). The way we see history affects
the waywe see our present field. The dismissal of a sixty-year chunk of history
is especially problematic because, as Andrea Lunsford has pointed out, we
have not yet reached agreement as to our professionalidentity (72). Lunsford,
in her keynote address to CCCC in 1989, called upon all of us who teach
composition and especially on those of us who are the historians of the field
to "compose ourselves," declaring that we need "to view writing from a
variety of perspectives and throughout history" (72-73). I would emphasize
that we need to look at all of our history, including that of the first sixty years
of the twentieth cen tury, if we are to view writing and the teaching of wri ting
from the full range of perspectives.
In addition to those in the "first generation" who struggled in the 1960s
and 1970s to professionalize the teaching of composition and who thus have
difficulty looking Objectively at the pre-professional history of the field,
those historians who have relied narrowly on textbooks for information are
especially guilty of promulgating the view that nothing much happened in
composition between 1900 and 1960. Regrettably, according to Stephen
North, most composition history to date has been based on textbooks or on
previously published scholarship. Few composition historians have yet
examined student texts, syllabi, or aSSignments, nor have they gathered oral
material to any extent from teachers and students. North argues that
textbook-based histories cannot tell us much about actual classroom practice
(73-74). Nor can they reveal much about the broad context of issues-including
demographic, geographic, economic, social, political, gender, institutional,
and departmental issues-which have affected the teaching of writing. Thus
we do not know, with regard to earlier periods, the answers to such basic
questions as: "Who learned to write? How many of them were there? How
much did their teachers get paid?" (77). We do not even know, as Sharon
Crowley points out, why most writing instructors since 1900 have been
underpaid, part-time, non-tenure-track faculty or graduate students, or why
research in composition has generally been assigned a low status (247). Nor,
I might add, do we know why most writing instructors have been women.
Composition Histories and Terministic Screens
Let me turn to specific works. Probably the most widely-read of the
The History of Composition 41
composition histories currently available are James Berlin's Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (1984) and his Rhetoric and
Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 (1987), which
taken together comprise a comprehensive survey of the history of the field.
Berlin's histories are based on other histories, or, as Robert Connors said of
the earlier of the two, they are essentially popular syntheses aimed at
composition professionals in general, rather than original historical contributions based on primary research ("Review" 247). As such, they are subject
to the limitations of their sources.
Berlin claims that one theory of rhetoric, "current-traditional" rhetoric,
which he derides as "objective" and "positivistic," has predominated over all
other theories for the last hundred years (Rhetoric 9). However, his coverage
of developments in the early twentieth century is much sketchier than his
coverage of developments either in the late nineteenth century, when current-traditional rhetoric was formulated, or since 1960. His lack of attention
to the theoretical work of the early and mid-twentieth century is particularly
puzzling. Berlin effectively ignores LA Richards, perhaps because Richards
was British, although he taught for many years at Harvard and is widely
regarded as one of the important rhetoricians of his period. More surprisingly, in view of Berlin's acknowledgement that his understanding of both
rhetoric and historiography owes much to Kenneth Burke, he avoids discussing Burke either systematically or at length (Rhetoric 17-18).
Berlin's work is flawed, moreover, by his use of an epistemological
taxonomy that operates as a powerful terministic screen and all too often
dominates his narrative. Contending that "to teach writing is to argue for a
version of reality," he classifies different pedagogies and rhetorical theories
according to their different views of writer, reader, reality, and language
("Contemporary" 47-48). Thus, in Writing Instruction he groups nineteenthcentury rhetorics under three heads, and in Rhetoric and Reality he classifies
twentieth-century rhetoric as either objective, subjective, or transactional.
His categories allow him to generalize across large spans of time, but also to
ignore the immediate contexts ofissues and ideas. l Berlin takes little account
of disparities within any individual's or school's approach, or of changes in
that approach over time. The distortions thus crea ted are all the more glaring
because Berlin spotlights the categories he prefers. In Rhetoric and Reality,
his favored class is transactional rhetoric, his least favored, objective rhetoric. Current-traditional rhetoric, or "the most pervasive of Objective rhetorics," comes off especially badly, but so does general semantics, which Berlin
treats as a minor variety of objective rhetoric (9).
In some ways of course, Berlin is correct in pointing out that Alfred
Korzybski, the founder ofthe general semantics movement and a significant
early twentieth-century rhetorician, has positivistic notions about the relations between mind, the word, and the world (Rhetoric 95). Certainly, when
Korzybski calls for increasing the conformity between language and the
42 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
structures of both the empirical world and of the human nervous system, he
is expressing these positivistic notions (11). But when Korzybski says that we
project the structure of our language upon the world around us (90), he is
expressing what Berlin would call subjective views. At other points, when
Korzybski says that culture is a productoflanguage (24), or when he suggests
that by changing language it is possible to change human nature (lxv), he is
expressing transactional views. The very aphorism which is perhaps most
identified with Korzybski, "a map is not the territory it represents," exemplifies his conception of the constructed nature of reality (58). Not only are
words abstractions from a territory, in Korzybski's view, but different maps
represent different features of that territory according to their different
purposes.
To dismiss Korzybski as an objective rhetorician seems much less useful
than to look at how Korzybski responded to issues and questions within a
particular temporal context or to compare his approach to those of others
during his period. Korzybski, like many of his contemporaries, may have had
too credulous a faith in scientific progress, but he understood the significance
of Einstein's revolution in physics and of the contributions of the emerging
social sciences. According to Korzybski, Einstein not only provided a new
model for explaining the universe, he demonstrated that any such model, his
as well as Newton's, was necessarily a "conceptual construction." Similarly,
Korzybski concurred with anthropologists in viewing human nature, once
considered immutable, asa cultural construct (86). Korzybski's awareness of
multiple realities is one of the key factors by which I distinguish his rhetoric
from the current-traditional variety Berlin claims was dominant at Korzybski's
period. Berlin's lumping of both Korzybski's approach and that of the
current-traditionalists within the category of objective rhetoric obscures the
key differences between these alternatives.
An important source for, and source of distortion in, Berlin's discussion
of current-traditional rhetoric is Albert Kitzhaber's groundbreaking 1953
dissertation, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900.2 I should note,
however, that Kitzhaber never referred to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century rhetoric as "current-traditional" because that term was not
coined until six years after he published his dissertation. 3 Nevertheless, his
characterization of the rhetoric developed by the authors of the leading
composition textbooks of the 1880s and 1890s informs much of our presentday thinking about "current-traditional" rhetoric.
Kitzhaber bases his conclusions regarding his focal period on an exhaustive survey of nineteenth-century textbooks, but I fault him on two counts: he
assumes that textbooks both originate theory and determine classroom
practice, and he oversteps the boundaries of his study by making a number of
loose and damaging generalizations about twentieth-century composition.
He provides no evidence that he surveyed textbooks from the first half of the
twentieth century as carefully as he did those of the previous half century. In
The History of Composition 43
the twentieth century, moreover, rhetorical theory has tended to originate in
the professional literature rather than in textbooks (see Welch, especially
269).
Kitzhaber begins with a negative premise, declaring that the latter half
of the nineteenth century "can hardly be called a particularly distinguished
time in the history of rhetoric" (97). Yet it was the period of the first
appearance of a distinctly American rhetoric, emphasizing written discourse
and designed to serve the utilitarian aims of a newly industrial society and of
the emerging American university (80, 344-45). Kitzhaber identifies four
rhetoricians-Adams Sherman Hill, Barrett Wendell, John Franklin Genung,
and Fred Newton Scott, whom he subsequently refers to as the "big four" -who
through the textbooks they published did the most to shape the theory and
practice of composition teaching in the last third ofthe century. Ofthese, he
says that only Scott4 can be called an original theorist (97). He shows that
Genung popularized the four modes of discourse (exposition, description,
narration, and argumentation), Wendell focussed on unity, emphasis and
coherence as the bases of style, Hill insisted upon correctness, and Scott
developed paragraph theory. Kitzhaber claims that these elements of
rhetoric dominated most composition textbooks from the 1890s through the
first several decades of our century.
Mechanical correctness, according to Kitzhaber in 1953, received primary focus in most composition texts from the late nineteenth century
through the date of his own publication (264). Wendell's stylistic triad of
unity-emphasis-coherence also featured prominently in most texts throughout this period (184). Textbooks were organized around the four forms of
discourse, which Kitzhaber derides as "inimical to communicative rhetoric,"
until well into the 1930s (221,240). Finally, Kitzhaber claimed, no one had
added anything new to paragraph theory since Scott (242). Kitzhaber
concluded that rhetorical theory in America had stagnated and blamed this
on the practice of textbook authors in copying from one another (261).
Kitzhaber's view of the stagnation of rhetorical theory in the early
twentieth century has been widely accepted. As 1 have noted, Berlin both
acknowledges Kitzhaber's dissertation as an important source for his Writing
Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges and dismisses currenttraditional rhetoric as "the manifestation of the assembly line in education"
(3, 62). Similarly, Donald Stewart both recalls having advised a graduate
student that Kitzhaber's dissertation ought to be a basic introduction to the
field for anyone planning to teach composition and concludes, "I have
become convinced that a writing teacher's development can be measured by
the degree to which that person has become liberated from current-traditional rhetoric" ("History" 16). Similarly, Robert Connors both remembers
that during his apprenticeship as a historian, he had little more to go on than
Kitzhaber and the National Union Catalog and asserts that "our diSCipline
has been long in knuckling from its eyes the sleep of the nineteenth and early
44 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
twentieth centuries" ("Historical" 162; "Rise" 455). Berlin follows Kitzhaber
in treating Scott's work more sympathetically than that of Hill, Wendell, and
Genung (Writing, chapters 6 and 7). Stewart, owing perhaps to Kitzhaber's
view of Scott as the only original rhetorical theorist of the late nineteenth
century, has made it his mission to reclaim Scott's legacy ("Fred Newton
Scott," "Rediscovering Fred Newton Scott," "Two Model Teachers").
Connors agrees with Kitzhaber both that the modes of discourse dominated
composition pedagogy from 1895 to 1930 and that they did not help students
learn to write ("Rise" 444,454). He also agrees with Kitzhaber that most
writing teachers were obsessed with mechanical correctness from the late
nineteenth century until fairly recently ("Mechanical" 61).
Connors, like Kitzhaber, bases his studies largely on textbooks. Although he concedes that textbooks cannot tell a historian all that he or she
wants to know, he claims they "provide the best reflection we have of what
actually was taught as the subject matter of composition" ("Historical" 164).
He assumes that composition pedagogywas shaped primarily by textbooks at
least until the 1930s when, he says, professional journals also began to assert
an influence ("Textbooks" 178). However, since, as he points out, textbooks
are "conservators of tradition" ("Historical" 164), I would contend that the
view they provide is of a more conservative field than might be inferred from
other sources. Connors blames textbook publishers for promoting currenttraditional rhetoric in the late nineteenth century and perpetuating it in the
twentieth, which may be so, but the degree to which composition teachers
followed their textbooks is open to dispute. Perhaps teachers generated
materials of their own or used student writing as the focus of classroom
activity. Perhaps they compensated for the limitations of their textbooks, as
Mike Rose claims "good" teachers do, by skipping around among chapters,
by qualitying authorial pronouncements, and by supplementing with handouts ("Sophisticated" 70).
And if textbooks cannot tell us much about actual classroom practice,
they also cannot tell us much about the degree to which teachers were aware
of pedagogical and theoretical alternatives in their field. Especially after the
founding of NCfE in 1911 and of the Progressive Education Association in
1918-19, and after the appearance of English Journal in 1912, composition
teachers are likely to have encountered professional ideas from a variety of
sources in addition to textbooks. Leonard Greenbaum has traced a series of
articles from 1911 through 1969 criticizing the freshman writing course (17585). Anne Ruggles Gere has compiled a "small but steady list of publications" on writing groups from the years between 1900 and the late 1960s (28,
126-33). Kenneth Kantor has listed a stream of publications from the turn
of the century through 1971 on the role of creative expression in the language
arts curriculum (5,27-29). Both Gere and Kantor remark on the Similarity
between arguments made early in the century and those advanced currently
(Gere 18; Kantor 5). Moreover, the existence of the literature which these
The History of Composition 45
historians survey indicates a livelier and more diverse field than those who
have looked only at the textbooks of this period have represented. Unfortunately, historians who base their work primarily on textbooks, like Kitzhaber
and Connors, and other historians who accept and republicize their conclusions, as Berlin has done with Kitzhaber's, have already done much to
promulgate the notion that the teaching of composition stagnated for twothirds of a century.
Paradigms or Power Plays?
An additional group of scholars has looked to textbooks for support for their
view, equally unfortunate historiographically, that a paradigm shift occurred
in composition studies in the 1960s. Richard Young, who originated this idea
in his "Paradigms and Problems," found evidence for it in textbooks, which
he said "elaborate and perpetuate established paradigms" (31). Maxine
Hairston added in "The Winds of Change" that "one way to discover the
traditional paradigm ofa field is to examine its textbooks" (15). But the main
reason why Young and Hairston saw the unfOlding history of the field in
terms of a binary opposition between competing paradigms was no doubt
that they hoped to reform the teaching of composition. Young, who wanted
to restore invention to its classical preeminence as a rhetorical concern,
borrowed the concept of the paradigm shift from Thomas Kuhn's The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He also borrowed a term from Daniel
Fogarty's Roots for a New Rhetoric and referred to the conceptual system
which he claimed was established by 1900 and governed the teaching of
composition for the following three generations as the "current-traditional
paradigm" (30-31). Young characterized early twentieth -century rhetoric in
much the same way as Kitzhaber 5 had done, but in Young's treatment the
"paradigm" which governed the teaching of this period became a straw man
and a target for reform. According to Young, the features of currenttraditional rhetoric included an "emphasis on the composed product rather
than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into words, sentences,
and paragraphs; the classification of discourse into description, narration,
exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling,
punctuation) and with style (economy, clarity, emphasis); the preoccupation
with the informal essay and research paper; and so on" (31). One of the chief
fa ul ts ofthe old paradigm and a chief reason why it was inadeq uate as a model
for teaChing, in Young's view, was its failure to include invention within the
province of rhetoric (33). According to Young, a new paradigm was emerging, based on new theories of invention, including Burke's dramatistic
pentad, and on a view of composing as process not product (35).
Four years after Young's article appeared, Maxine Hairston, whose
reformist agenda was headed by the wish to promote empirical research,
seconded his notion that a "revolution" or "paradigm shift" was occurring in
the teaching of writing. To Young's list of the features of the current-
46 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
traditional paradigm, Hairston added the following three: "its adherents
believe that competent writers know what they are going to say before they
begin to wri te; ... that the com posing process is linear, ... [and] that teaching
editing is teaching writing" (16). Hairston also listed twelve features of the
emerging, process-centered paradigm for the teaching of writing. The new
paradigm was rhetorically based, it was informed by other disciplines, notably
by linguistics and by cognitive psychology, and it was grounded in research
into the writing process (24).
A number of historians subsequently joined Young and Hairston in
using the "new paradigm" terminology. James Berlin and Robert Inkster
declared that "the current-traditional paradigm represents a danger to
teachers, students, the wider purposes of our educational enterprise, and
even our social and human fabric" (13). Elsewhere, Berlin contended that
current-traditional rhetoric operated as a "compelling paradigm," making it
impossible for the majority of composition teachers "to conceive of the
discipline in any other way" (Rhetoric 9). Donald Stewart expressed the hope
that historical knowledge would "liberate the current-traditional composition teacher from the old paradigm" ("History" 20-21). Janet Emig called on
composition teachers to undergo a shift, or "conversion experience," from
what she termed a "magical thinking paradigm" to a "developmental"
paradigm ("Non-Magical" 139-41).
Other scholars, however, have begun to criticize the application of
Kuhn's terminology to composition studies. Connors has observed that the
use of the term "paradigm" amounts to a claim that composition studies is or
could be a scientific field ("Composition" 17). He also notes that Kuhn uses
the term in two distinct ways: in one sense he uses it to mean "disciplinary
matrix," or a system of values, beliefs, and so on; but in another sense he uses
it to mean "exemplar," or the kind of model that can serve as the basis for
solutions to problems. Young and Hairston, according to Connors, overlook
this distinction. Connors concludes that composition studies has a disciplinary matrix but lacks exemplars ("Composition" 2,9). North has pointed out
that discussions of a paradigm shift beg the question of whether composition
studies is a discipline. If composition was guided by a paradigm at the turn
of the century, he asks, doesn't that imply that it had the coherence of a
discipline even then? Moreover, the assumption that composition has a
paradigmatic structure contradicts North's own assumption that research
and teaChing in the field is methodologically pluralistic. North contends that
the "paradigm shift" explanation should be read as a sort of power play
whereby the proponents ofthe "new paradigm" attempt to assert dominance
over the masses of classroom teachers who still presumably teach composition in the tired old way (320-22).
It seems to me that there are also historiographical reasons why Young
and Hairston's assumptions should be questioned. In the first place, in their
opposition to a supposedly monolithic traditional paradigm, they have not
The History of Composition 47
had sufficient regard for the complexity of the actual historical record or the
variety of methods which were available to teachers even before 1960.
Reformers, as Lawrence Cremin has pointed out, are "notoriously ahistorical"
(8). They tend, according to Greg Myers, "to overlook the efforts and the
lessons of earlier reformers" (154). Moreover, Young and Hairston imply
that history progresses in sudden bursts and make no attempt to account for
the causes of the revolution they say occurred. Although Hairston concedes
that this revolution must have had causes, she says modestly that "to identify
and trace all these complex developments would go far beyond the scope of
this article and beyond my current state of enlightenment" (18). She also
quotes Kuhn to the effect that "the transition between competing paradigms
cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic.... Like the gestalt switch,
it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all"
(Hairston 26; Kuhn 150). Young concedes that "seen through the historian's
eyes, revolutions are more likely to appear as stages in the growth of a
discipline" (46). lndeed they are! It seems to me that what Young and
Hairston describe as a revolution could more properly be described as a
process of professionalization in an emerging field.
The unfortunate result is that due to the influence of Kitzhaber and his
followers on the one hand and of Young and Hairston on the other, the
history of composition between 1900 and 1960 has remained largely
unexamined. No one has catalogued the methodological alternatives which
were available to teachers during this reputedly monolithic period. No one
has accounted adequately for the first moves toward professionalization in
the 1930s and 1940s. The phrase "current-traditional rhetoric" has become
a terministic screen that no one has attempted to see through.
Our Lost History
Yet even a superficial look will indicate that a number of important professional and intellectual developments affected the teaChing of composition
and that a number of methodological options were available to composition
teachers during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. During this
period, because of the founding of NCTE in 1911 and CCCC in 1949, and
because of the appearance of new journals which dealt directly or tangentially with composition, composition teaChing gained a new measure of
professional coherence.6 Fred Newton Scott had begun offering graduate
courses in rhetoric at the University of Michigan just before the turn of the
century (Kitzhaber 118). Cross-curricular writing programs were introduced
at around the same time and subsequently proliferated (Russell 52). Organized freshman composition programs first appeared in significant numbers
between 1920 and 1940 (Berlin, Rhetoric 65). The first college-level communications courses were introduced at the University ofIowa in 1944 (Connors,
"Mechanical" 70). In the period between the two world wars, composition
teaching was stimula ted especially significantly by the progressive ed uca tion
48 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
movement, the efficiency movement, and the emergence of the social sciences. In the 1940s and 1950s, the general education movement and the
communications movement had important effects on the teaching of composition.
From roughly the late teens, progressive educators made it their aim to
cultivate both the individual and the social group and thus to place new
emphases on both the expressive and communicative functions of rhetoric
(Berlin, Rhetoric 59-60). Progressive teachers of composition initiated the
use of student/teacher conferences, of editorial groups, of journal-keeping
assignments, and of courses in creative writing (Wozniak chapter 5; Berlin,
Rhetoric chapter 4). The project method, which was first outlined in 1917 and
which entailed building curricula out of a series of projects students were to
complete or problems they were to solve, was quickly recognized as an
especially useful approach to the teaching of writing (Applebee 108-09).
Also during the progressive 1920s and 1930s, a number of colleges began to
use placement tests and ability grouping in the hope of providing more
effectively for individual student differences (Wozniak 187, 198; Applebee
91). At roughly the same time period, advocates of efficiency were promoting
empirical research, scientific measurement, and the application of science to
education (Applebee 79-80; Berlin, Rhetoric 53-54). As a result,a new breed
of empirical researchers began to scrutinize composition teaching in new
ways. Research studies which were conducted as early as the teens in such
areas as remediation, error, and the use of grammar drills provided a new
kind of evidence of the futility of traditional attempts to teach correctness
(Connors, "Mechanical" 70). For his Cu"ent English Usage, published in
1932, Sterling Andrus Leonard conducted the first large-scale survey of
opinion about usage and grammar, thus producing an impressively scientific
indictment of the pedagogy of correctness (Brereton 96-100).
In the 1940s and 1950s, advocates of general education programs argued
that because language was instrumental to the formation, organization, and
communication of knowledge, writing should be regarded as a basic mode of
learning and the writing course as a key component of any core curriculum.
The authors oftheProgressive Education Association's Language in General
Education, published in 1940, held the study oflanguage to be at the heart of
general education and recommended devcloping language instruction "around
a concept of language as an indispensable, potent, but highly fluid set of
symbols by which human beings mentally put their feelings and experiences
in order, get and keep in touch with other human beings, and build up a new
and clearer understanding ofthe world around them (32,3). In his "Linguistic Approach to Problems in Education," published in 1955 for an audience
of educational theorists, Kenneth Burke used his definition of man as "the
symbol-using animal" as the basis of his argument for restoring rhetoric to its
central preeminence in education (259). The interdisciplinary communications movement, which was an offshoot of the general education movement,
The History of Composition 49
also helped to rekindle the interest of composition teachers in rhetoric and
in the 2500-year-old rhetorical tradition (Berlin, Rhetoric 93,115-19). This
movement-which stemmed partly from the introduction of the new media
of radio, cinema, and television, and partly from concerns about propaganda
and advertising, as well as from the general education movement-led to the
creation of courses which linked instruction in writing to instruction in
speaking and reading.
The advent of the social sciences in the early twentieth century had a
particularly important impact on rhetorical theory and, according to Herbert
Hackett, on the communications course as well (290). Because psychologists
had begun studying the subconscious, some rhetorical theorists began to take
it for granted that there was more going on beneath the surface of any
discourse than either the writer or an audience could apprehend. I.A
Richards pointed out that thoughts were often complicated by feelings and
intentions (Practical 328). Kenneth Burke expanded his conception of
audience situations to include the internal dialogue of ego confronting id and
super-ego (Rhetoric 37-38). Anthropologists, meanwhile, were looking at
language as an instrument of culture and society. The anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski, in an essay published in 1923 as a supplement to C.K.
Ogden and I.A Richards' The Meaning ofMeaning, defined language as both
"a mode of human behaviour" and "a link in concerted human activity"
(312). Ogden and Richards acknowledged a special debt to Malinowski for
the support his field research in the Trobriand Islands lent to their context
theory of reference (ix).
With respect to the development of rhetorical theory, the second quarter
of the twentieth century was far from stagnant. According to Daniel Fogarty,
whose Roots for a New Rhetoric was published in 1959, at least three
important new theories of rhetoric-those of I.A Richards, of Kenneth
Burke, and of the general semanticists-had emerged between approximately 1920 and 1950 (3-4). Richards analyzed metaphor and the relations
between thought, word, and thing (Fogarty 36-44). The Meaning ofMeaning,
published by Richards and C.K. Ogden in 1923, was a groundbreaking inquiry
into how words work, how they serve both referential and emotive functions,
how they are related to the things they represent, and how they may be
interpreted in context. Richards dismissed the notion that words are a
medium in which to copy life, arguing instead that they serve as "the occasion
and the means of that growth which is the mind's endless endeavor to order
itself' (Philosophy 131). The general semanticists, including Alfred Korzybski
and S.1. Hayakawa, developed a detailed theory of abstraction (Fogarty 10003). Burke substituted identification for Aristotle's persuasion as the central
element of rhetoric, which he redefined as "the use of language as a symbolic
means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols"
(Rhetoric 43).
50 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
I hope I have shown a sufficient range of developments in rhetorical
theory, curricular theory, and pedagogical practice to counter the assumptions that composition either stagnated in the early twentieth century or was
governed by a monolithic "current-traditional" paradigm. I believe the
period is eminently worthy of renewed historical attention. In order truly to
understand the history of this maligned period, however, historians will have
to look beyond textbooks, and even beyond the professional literature of the
period, for new sources of information. Oral material from teachers and
former students is a rich potential resource. 7 Syllabi, assignment sheets,
dittoed handouts, student papers and teachers' responses to them, course
and teacher evaluations, student journals, teacher's journals, letters, interdepartmental memos, and similar ephemera may also give us new views of
writing instruction at earlier periods. Without such material, some of which
is still available from the early twentieth century but will rapidly become
scarcer, it is difficult to determine how far teachers responded to progressive
ideas or how much they were aware of the theoretical work of say, Richards
and Burke. Until such material has been considered, it is premature to
conclude that current-traditional rhetoric was the dominant and all-pervasive rhetoric of the period.
I am fortunate to have a rich variety of resources-including aSSignment
series, student essays, and staff papers, as well as faculty and alumni willing
to talk to me-for a study I am currently making of English 1-2 at Amherst
College, a two-semester, freshman writing course which was directed by
Theodore Baird from 1938-1966. These resources are indispensable since,
except locally, little was published about English 1-2 and since, after the first
year, no textbook was used in the course. As Baird explained in 1939,
commenting on that first year, "After a few weeks both students and instructors were convinced that the English language cannot be so silly as the three
authors of our textbook seemed to require. . .. We demolished the book,
tearing out pages (it had a ring binder) as we went, analyzing the conception
of grammar and of language implied on every page" ("English 1 e" 329-30).
In the absence of a textbook, Baird and the eight orten instructors on his
staff collaborated in generating assignments and turned to student writing
for the material for class discussions. The English 1-2 staff devised a new and
hefty sequence of 33 assignments each semester and, because the course was
required, collectively administered them to every first-year student at the
college. Students turned in one assignment each class period, received
another, and then discussed specimen responses, selected and mimeographed
by their instructor, to the assignment completed for the previous period.
The assignment sequences asked students to write from experience in
order to make sense of that experience. In the fall of 1946, for example,
students were asked first to describe a technique they knew how to perform,
then to explain how they had learned to perform it, to distinguish between a
teChnique and a fluke, to describe a situation in which they had taught a
The History of Composition 51
technique to someone else, to explain how they knew whether they had
succeeded in teaching it, to distinguish between things which can and cannot
be taught, and so on. The following spring, they were asked to write about
their learning in the several subject areas of Amherst's core curriculum and
to work out the ways in which each discipline represented a specialized
language and a specialized way of organizing experience. The English 1-2
syllabus, which was generally read aloud to students at the beginning of the
fall term, warned them that they would find themselves "in a situation where
no one knows the answers." They should not assume they could learn to write
by memorizing a body of rules, such as for the use of the comma or for
constructing a paragraph, as if a composition "were made of building
blocks." The syllabus defined writing as "an action," something students
were to do, and as "an art," how to succeed at which, "no one knows how to
teach another."8
It is possible for me to estimate which theoretical works informed the
course and guided its teachers because from time to time Professor Baird
distributed a list of suggested readings to his staff. One such list, circulated
in April of 1946, contained citations to Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of
Meaning, Richards' Interpretation in Teaching, Korzybski's Science and Sanity, Hayakawa's Language inAction, Bridgman's The Logic ofModern Physics,
and William James' Pragmatism. 9 In its turn, the course enjoyed a certain
influence. Although neither Baird nor anyone on his staff published much
about English 1-2 during theyears itwas a going concern, several of his junior
colleagues, including Walker Gibson and William E. Coles, Jr., subsequently
wrote about similar courses they designed and taught elsewhere (see Gibson's
Seeing and Writing and Coles's The Plural I and Composing). The course
described in Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts by David Bartholomae and
Anthony Petrosky, colleagues of Coles's at the University of Pittsburgh, also
has some of the features of English 1-2 at Amherst College, including
collaborative teaching and sequenced writing assignments.
Reclaiming Our History
I am interested in English 1-2, among other reasons, because the course used
student writing as its text, because its students wrote from experience,
because its instructors taught collaboratively, because it addressed the issue
of writing in the disciplines, and because it seems very different from the kind
of "current-traditional" course said to have been standard at its period.
Other studies similar to mine of other early and mid-twentieth-century
courses, if enough of them can be completed, may show that currenttraditional rhetoric was not so monolithic nor composition theory and
pedagogy so stagnant as textbook-based histories have indicated.
We need to reclaim all our history, including the history during the
period before our field achieved its current professional status, if we are to
have any hope of solidifying our academic identity, answering detractors,
52 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
evaluating the appeals of reformers, and guiding students and the profession
wisely into the twenty-first century. We need to know where we have been in
order to know who we are and where we are going. The successes and failures
of our predecessors can and should inform our teaching. Since the central
function of history is to promote dialectic, and since the field of composition
studies has now moved beyond its infancy, its historians should be exercising
the critical self-consciousness that is a mark of any mature field. lO
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts
Notes
lCompare Berlin's disregard for institutional and social factors that shaped the teaching
of writing with the careful attention Mike Rose and David Russell give to such contexts. Rose
elCllmines evolving institutional attitudes and policies concerning basic writing courses ("Language"), and Russell explains that because of the compartmentalization of knowledge and other
structural problems within academia, WAC programs have had only limited success (52-53).
2In 1990, thirty-seven years after its completion, Kitzhaber'sRhetoric inAmerican Colleges,
1850-1900 appeared for the first time in a published edition. It is now available from Southern
Methodist University Press, which is promoting Kitzhaber's study as "the most-quoted unpublished dissertation since T.S. Eliot's" (see the advertisement at the back of College English 52.6,
October 1990).
3The term is Daniel Fogarty's and appears in hisRooL\' for a New Rhetoric (118), but it was
popularized by Richard Young who borrowed it for "Paradigms and Problems" (30).
4Berlin, who concurs with Kitzhaber in regarding Scott as an original theorist, finds that
"after considering Scott's theoretical statements" about rhetoric, his textbooks are a bit
disappointing" (Writing81). It seems that even Scott used the professional literature rather than
his textbooks as the vehicle for introducing theory.
5Young cites Kitzhaber's dissertation as a valuable work on the history of currenttraditional rhetoric (46).
6For a chronological list of journals dealing with composition and composition pedagogy,
see Connors ("Historical" 163).
7Andrea Lunsford reports that CCCChopes to sponsor oral histories of its past chairs (77).
8Asummaryoftheassignments for 1946-47 is included in Baird's "English 1-2: History and
Content, August, 1946," a twenty-four-pagedescription ofthecoursewhich can be found in "Eng
1,1946/47, Sec E [Gibson]-1946 Sep-1947 Jan" in Box 1, English 1-2 collection, Amherst
College Archives. These assignments are also reproduced in a 1971 dissertation (Louis 163-75).
The version of the English 1-2 syllabus from which I have quoted is an undated, four-page
document entitled "Excerpts from description of English 1-2, usually read aloud on second day
of class," in Box 1, English 1-2 collection, Amherst College Archives.
9A copy of this reading list can be found in "Eng 1, 1945/46, Assignments, 'Brower and
Castle,'-1946 Spring" in Box 1, English 1-2 collection, Amherst College Archives.
1°1 wish to thank Charles Adams, Robin Dizard, Peter Elbow, and Anne Herrington for
critical readings of earlier drafts of this paper.
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Kinneavy Award Winners Announced
TheJamesL. Kinneavy Award for the most outstanding essay in volume 10
of JAC was awarded to Joy S. Ritchie for "Confronting the 'Essential'
Problem: Reconnecting Feminist Theory and Pedagogy." Professor Ritchie
received a cash award and a framed citation.
Richard M. Coe received an honorable mention for "Defining
Rhetoric-and Us" and also received a framed citation.
The award is generously endowed by Professor Kinneavy, Blumberg
Centennial Professor at the University of Texas, and was presented by him
at the meeting of the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition
at the CCCC Connvention in Boston.